Thursday, November 04, 2004

The topic du jour

I think one thing that might help this discussion is if we were to agree to
clearly distinguish matters of religion from matters of faith and matters of
morality. Perhaps we should blame it on the media, who have a tendency to favor
simplified explanations, but the lines between these matters has become
increasingly blurred in the last decade or so. As I said in my previous post on
this topic, faith and religion are not equivalent topics. One can have faith
without being religious(1).

Many on the left who openly mock faith do so, I suspect, out of a mistaken
conflation of their worst experiences of religiosity with all matters of faith.
They need to learn the difference. But it would also help matters if people on
the religious right understood that those people on the left who feel that way
may actually have just cause for their feelings.

It's in the nature of a dialog that each side needs to learn to look through
the eyes of the other side. If we don't, all of us, right and left, will live to
regret it.

(1. One could be religious without necessarily having faith. This would
include those people who have attended church regularly all their life but do so
more out of habit then out of personal conviction.)